Friday, January 11, 2008

Spam blogs (splogs): What to do when your blog is marked as a splog

Questions and/or complaints of blogs being marked as spam blog or splog is quite common. Result can vary. In some cases, you have to complete a word verification before you can publish a new post. In other cases, you can't even publish. In the worst case, your blog gets deleted.

What are spam blogs or splogs

spam blogs (splogs) are a big scrouge (no speak english blogger hoping for spelling correction) and a big headache for Blogger as well as us innocent bloggers. Recently, I had 2 of my blogs marked as spam blog (very innocent blog and only ocassional posting). I have to click the ? icon to complete word verification (captcha) to get a human review. One of the blog has been cleared and now waiting for another

Why there are so many spam blogs

Because Google Blogger is so generous, their generosity have been abused. There is a huge amount of splogs on the web and they clog up the search engines and suck traffic from us innocent bloggers. Blogger have to use robotic programs to hunt them down and try to eliminate them as it is not possible to do them manually (too much).

What to do when your blog is marked as a spam blog

There will be false positive and we just have to be patient, click on the ? icon, complete the captcha, and wait. It cannot be helped.

If you click on a link to find out what is going on, this will be what you will see:


Your blog requires word verification

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

AND THIS IF YOU HAVE COMPLETED CAPTCHA AND CLICK ON THE ? ICON AGAIN:

We received your unlock request on January 8, 2008. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.




Peter Chen's nice graphic signature